The conjoined cultures of sentimentality and over-optimism are destroying our society. Today, I want to concentrate on sentimentality.
This ensures that people in positions of power take decisions based on how their judgments make them feel about themselves – the important thing is that their choice proves them to be warm, cuddly, caring, compassionate, and generally in touch with their inner female (even if they are, in fact, female) rather than the likelihood of the proposed course of action having an outcome that will benefit the rest of us.
Consider the case of the idiot police force which recommended that an idiot judge place a 19-year old burglar who had admitted to a total of SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY-TWO robberies and burglaries on a “trial” three-year rehabilitation scheme rather than sent him to prison. As a result, this vile speck of human ordure was sent to live in Chelmsford, where, surprise surprise, the crime rate rocketed.
Yesterday Judge Christopher Ball (how very singular) jailed the object of his big-hearted compassion to five years in prison, which is what the little turd should have been given in the first place – and admitted that his initial “gamble” had failed. (You think?)
The clue, M’Lud, is in the word “gamble”. Your job, in case you’d forgotten, is to offer some protection to those of us who haven’t frightened and upset 662 innocent citizens by stealing from them. I hate to be controversial, butwe’re sort of the ones that matter in all this. If you want to feel good about yourself, how about displaying just a modicum of compassion towards the… now, what is the word? – ah, yes: VICTIMS! What, in the name of God, convinced you that our safety was worth a bit of a flutter?
I don’t care if Judge Ball gets up every morning feeling really bad about himself. If he doesn’t like sending criminals to jail, he should retire or find another job. Judges, if memory serves me right, used to be crusty old buggers who, as John Mortimer QC once remarked, always seemed to be in a filthy temper. This strikes me as an ideal frame of mind for anyone preparing to dispense justice on behalf of the law-abiding public. If it could be arranged, I’d prefer a judge preparing to sentence anyone who had burgled my house or mugged any member of my family to be suffering from raging haemmhoroids, a bastard headache, and to have just heard that his own house has been broken into that very morning. Those who act on our behalf in the field of criminal justice – including that dismal oaf, Ken Clarke – should preferably be at the Dirty Harry end of the spectrum when it comes to their attitude to criminals: I really don’t want them to be slightly to the left of the average 22-year old female polytechnic-graduate social worker.
Supt Glenn Maleary, an Essex “policeman” – the bright spark, one presumes, who recommended that Judge Ball give a one-man crime wave a slap on the wrist before kissing it better – said afterwards, “I view the overall scheme, and the innovative approach that was taken… to still be a success.”
In which case, sir, you are a blithering idiot who should be dismissed from the force at once.
At the very least, Judge Ball and Supt Maleary should be made to visit every one of that nasty little shit Bradley Wernham’s victims - the original 662 and all those he stole from in Chelmsford after justice wasn’t done – and should be made to bend over and offer to have their useless arses kicked. After that, a tattooist should be employed to etch Adam Smith’s wonderful adage on their foreheads: “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent”.
That supremely wise commentator, Theodore Dalrymple, has been writing cogently about the deleterious effects of our prevailing culture of sentimentality for years, and has just returned to the subject in a brilliant article in the Spectator (hat-tip: Stuart Gronmark), which I can’t recommend highly enough.
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